In the afternoon he was received at her house, a mansion sumptuously arranged, but in a style that offended Wenk, for since yesterday his ideas of the Countess had made considerable advance, and it would have been pleasant to find himself more in sympathy with her tastes than this home of hers evidenced.
In the very entrance-hall the walls had been painted all over in Cubist forms and conventional designs tortured into weird shapes in endless succession, with splashes of colour here and there, as if to create an impression of the ardent temperament of the designer. “You are cold and passionless,” said he to himself; “of so calculating and cold a nature that if one among you disappears, the others have not enough red blood in their veins to notice his absence?”
The butler, the dark severity of whose livery was lightened by small silver buttons and blue lappets, took his hat and coat from him and announced him to the Countess, who was sitting at the tea-table.
“We shall not be alone long,” she said; “my husband will be home at five o’clock.”
But the decorations of the house had made Wenk feel unsympathetic, and before he answered he cast a hasty glance at the walls of the room. The Countess noticed it.
“That is all my husband’s doing,” she said. “To me it appears simply hideous. What are you to make out of it, if one paints a peasant, indicates some freshly painted barns, and then tells the beholder that it is a symphony of Beethoven’s? However, everyone to his taste—or are you perhaps a Futurist also?”
“I cannot say that,” said Wenk, “but you seem to imply that they are the only moderns. Yet all men in secret speak the same language. Our freedom to express ourselves comes only from individuality!”
“You want to be free?” said the lady. “Are you not your own salvation? Does not your calling, your expenditure of energy, give you your inner freedom? There is no salvation from without!”
“That is quite true,” said Wenk simply; and the womanly image which had haunted him since yesterday, and which seemed to be lost on entering this house, once more returned to his mind. “It is really what we were talking of yesterday, this balance of the forces of good and evil, and I wanted to talk to you about that again today.”
“I understood you aright,” answered the Countess. “I will confess to you that at first I thought you were on the search for an intrigue, and the idea amused me considerably, for God knows I seek something very different in the gaming-houses.”
“You will find what you are seeking in my work, Countess,” rejoined Wenk quickly.
Suddenly the butler, in his black livery, with its blue lappets and silver buttons, appeared noiselessly, and bent down whispering something to his mistress.
“My husband!” said the Countess to Wenk, fixing a steady and lingering glance on him, and as the Count came forward she introduced the two men.
Count Told was an extremely thin man, and gave an impression of excessive sprightliness. He was surprisingly young and very fashionably dressed. He gesticulated a good deal, and the movement of his hands gave prominence to a ring he wore, set with an unusual gem, such as Wenk had never before seen.
It might have been a flame topaz, with streaks of bloodred across it, trailing off into milky whiteness at the edges and emphasizing the clear honey colour of the transparent stone. In the middle of it, just where its lightning rays were most dazzling, was a tiny pearl, an islet, hardly larger than a freckle, but of a blue that put the sapphire into the shade, and. …
Thus Wenk was thinking to himself, unable to keep his eyes from the jewel.
“It is a trifle too big for my hand,” said the Count, answering his visitor’s unspoken thoughts, “but the stone is so … how shall I describe its originality? Well, I can only say that it is like a recital by Endivian, whom you doubtless know, and it was he who gave it to me. He brought it back from Penderappimur.”
“Is he the fashionable jeweller nowadays?” asked Wenk, who seemed somewhat at sea.
“Herr von Wenk,” said the Countess gravely, “Endivian is the fashionable young Goethe of this season.” Then she laughed. “No! Endivian the poet received the jewel at the Court of Artimerxes II, instead of the goblet, from the poem of his spiritual father … you know it, ‘Give me no golden chain’ … and when he returned, he announced in Germany, much as the Pope announces the Golden Rose, that his greatest admirer should have it. The choice fell upon my husband. It would have been better if he had given it me.”
“Why don’t you enthuse about him as I do?” asked the Count, with a pleasant smile, looking at her very tenderly as he spoke.
“Peter Resch dedicated his rubbish to him, and that was enough for me,” was the Countess’s laughing retort.
“Pooh, Peter Resch, indeed!” said the Count. “He is one of the Impressionists who has arrived. By the way, dearest, I have got something new.”
“From the Jennifer gallery?”
“Can one get a real picture anywhere else? There is nothing left. … And one has a clear and incontestable and direct impression. If the artistic temperament would only renounce colour … it would be the beginning of really abstract thought, of the detachment from everything which needs the help of another consciousness to interpret its vision.”
The Countess replied, with apparent earnestness: “Thank Heaven, we do get a little further. If in the realm of music, too, genius had any prospect of renouncing the crash of sound when it desires to express itself, the world would soon be attaining its aim.”
The Count went on enthusiastically: “A sublime
